How can I miss a sea I’ve never seen? Environmental learning through absence and reconstructing the Aral Sea’s ecological baseline

The Aral Sea is taught as an example of environmental change. Yet younger generations know its former ecological state through education, images, stories, and community memory. Drawing on Critical Pedagogy of Place, this qualitative study examines how students from the Aral Sea region and two urban contexts in Uzbekistan understand environmental loss they never experienced. Findings reveal different pathways through which participants lacked direct experiential access to the Aral Sea’s earlier ecological state. Some lived within a transformed landscape, while others encountered it primarily through representation. Across contexts, participants drew on schools, media, family and community narratives to reconstruct an ecological baseline they had not experienced. We conceptualize this as ‘environmental learning through absence,’ which may help resist normalization of degraded environmental conditions. Our conclusions illuminate an educational challenge as climate change transforms landscapes worldwide, showing how younger generations can understand and care for ecological conditions they never directly experienced.